Black Leaders Still Asking for the Right to Vote?

In case you missed it, there was a march in Washington on Saturday. Tens of thousands showed up to commemorate the 1963 civil rights demonstration. The one which featured Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

As expected, many participants wore Trayvon Martin T-shirts with signs that read “No justice, No peace.” Other signs called for voting rights, income equality, and a livable wage (as opposed to a minimum wage).

Various speakers included Eric Holder and Congressman John Lewis, who has paraded himself for half a century as the representative of all black people. Newark mayor Cory Booker made it clear that after 50 years of subprime loans, affirmative action, government handouts, black chiefs of police, black mayors, discriminatory hiring practices, equal housing protection, a black president and attorney general, and an affirmative-action healthcare law, some “African-Americans” are still not happy.

Our focus has broadened to include the cause of women, Latinos, lesbians, gays, people with disabilities…until every eligible American has the chance to exercise his or her right to vote unencumbered by discriminatory procedures, rules or practices.

Fifty years later, who is keeping them from voting? Are blacks, gays, Latinos, et al. so inept in Holder’s eyes that they can’t make it to the DMV to apply for an identification card? Heck, illegal immigrants are showing up at emergency rooms with picture IDs.

Holder, Lewis, and the rest of the well-off blacks asking for more in the name of the oppressed is a sad spectacle. Worse is their desperate need to fight battles they have already won. Their bowls were filled a long time ago, but that doesn’t stop them from spreading this propaganda to no-information voters.

Almost 50 years ago, I gave a little blood on that bridge in Selma for the right to vote. I am not going to stand by and let the Supreme Court take the right to vote away from us. You cannot stand by … the vote is precious. It is almost sacred; it is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society.

Lewis urged attendees like HuffPo/Root blogger Tracy Clayton to be “prepared to fight…There are forces, there are people who want to take us back.”

Clayton’s blog piece about the march this past Saturday puts her in the history-challenged category. Living wages and voting rights are “long overdue,” she writes.

Clayton, like the timeworn activists of the civil rights era, will never be free at last as long as there are more taxpayer monies at the end of the rainbow. It’s as if they are poker players who have won the game, cashed in their chips, and gotten their payout, but keep insisting they lost.

Clayton thinks the nation has made no progress in legislating equality.

There was something strikingly familiar in the demand for voting rights and a living wage. Listening to the thousands of voices demanding things that never should have been denied them in the first place, things that are long overdue, I felt a lot closer to that day in 1963…No matter the direction we walked, the crosses we bore, the songs we sang, the destination never changed.

In 50 years, it has not changed. While it is discouraging to flip through the pages of a history book and see so much of our old trials raging on, it is warming to know that we are still moving along this journey, eyes pointed to a common goal: justice, freedom, equality.

I have to ask: what do these agitators want? What kind of justice? The kind where stick-wielding Black Panthers stand outside a polling booth, intimidating white voters? Or the kind where fire departments lower their standards for pre-employment tests? Or the kind where hellions raise havoc in high schools but are not expelled because they’re black? Or the kind where hate crimes happen only to black people? Or the kind where a president and his attorney general string together nation-killing laws in the name of slavery?

The Saturday march in honor of MLK Jr. was a pathetic sequel to a life-changing event that could take place only once in history. Why don’t these rabble-rousers just get on with their lives? Why, as former mayor and renowned criminal Marion Barry told the upper northwest residents in D.C. when they couldn’t believe he was re-elected, don’t they just “get over it”?